‘You want to fight with the sister who left you all that time ago, because maybe if she had stayed you wouldn’t have gone looking for Nowak, and things would be different now.’ But she hadn’t stayed, and then she’d returned and stepped up, and somehow that had made him angrier, because he couldn’t hate her. He loved her, and he wanted her acceptance. ‘This is the great tragedy of your life? That you can’t make peace with someone who doesn’t exist any more, because she changed and got better, all without you getting the chance to tell her how you really felt?’ Up until now, Sakina had been respectful to Benyamin Khan, careful of his position as the son of Akbar Khan, brother to Jia Khan. But now he was just wasting her time.

She could still smell the sweat of her clients on her even after she finished scrubbing her skin in the shower at night. When she looked at herself in the mirror, her face gaunt, her skin having lost its shine, all she could think of were the beer guts and flabby bodies that pressed against her as she made her living, the way they heaved and sighed their way to ejaculation, the smell of booze and fags and body odour lingering long after they had left. No one washed for sex workers. Maybe if they did, they wouldn’t need their services. This was her life and she accepted it, not gratefully, and not forever, but for now. She would make plans once her brother had finished university. For now, her life wasn’t about happiness, it was about circumstances. But Benyamin, his circumstances weren’t the problem. He was. Sitting in the warm leather interior of his prestige vehicle, spending more on a bottle of perfume than a punter paid her to suck him off in the back of a beaten-up Toyota Corolla. His bills paid, his belly full, and here he was afraid to talk to his sister about unimportant things.

‘You’re entitled,’ she said. ‘You’re angry because your big sister rescued you. Because the way she looks at you, the things she says, makes you feel like less of a man. Well, guess what, that is all on you. Real men handle shit. So a woman came to rescue you, so what? No one ever came for me.’ She wanted to add, Get over it, just fucking get over yourself, but a knock on the tinted window interrupted her. They both turned and looked through the passenger-side window. It was Khalid the pimp.